Unfeel
by Lucifer's Garden
Summary: One shot: How a young man's guilt drove him towards madness, and ultimately how he was saved from it. DMHG


_**Unfeel**_

_**A/N:** Few HBP spoilers, and R just for violence. All characters belong to JK Rowling._

000

In a way, he mused, relocating the Order's headquarters to Hogwarts was a mildly clever move. The school had been closed for nearly a year since Dumbledore's death, and the Death Eaters had not exactly been expecting the Order to go back to the very place where the unfortunate incident occurred. They had assumed that the members would try to find some other secret hideaway that would require an obscene amount of planning to infiltrate. Hogwarts was the apex, the shining beacon of the light side. In retrospect, it was so glaringly obvious that it was unexpected.

They attacked under the cover of night, as usual. It felt strange to be walking down the old corridors again, after all these months. He could not help but feel dwarfed by the sheer size and grandeur of the old castle. It was like he'd never left. He might as well have been walking back to his dorm from the Astronomy tower after a few hours of quiet contemplation (a ritual that he never breathed a word about to another soul), or back from the room of requirement after a midnight liaison with some girl whose name he would forget later that week.

Instead, Draco Malfoy was racing down the hall with his wand in hand, searching for someone else to kill while the fortress shook with screams and explosions. Many portraits had been taken down, because some couldn't be trusted not to find their other frames and slip information to some unsavoury listeners. Those that remained hid out of sight.

The Order had gathered up a number of young recruits, mostly graduated students from before who were by some miracle willing to lay their lives down in battle. The professors, ministry members, students, and scatter of foolishly heroic civilians had moved back into the castle scarcely three nights ago.

Truth be told, Draco hadn't expected them to put up such a good defence. The element of surprise had certainly been theirs, but the Order was not prepared to go down without a fight. Rage and determination had quickly replaced shock and fear. At this point there was no telling who would win.

It was June 24th, Lucius decided, freshly liberated from his time in Azkaban and reinstated as the Dark Lord's right hand man. He had been killed within five minutes of blasting down the main entrance, caught in the crossfire of two opposing hexes.

It was pathetic. Draco's own father, the legendary Lucius Malfoy, killed _by accident_. Perhaps it was bound to happen sooner rather than later, but to blunder into a spell not even meant for him? Draco bit back a wave of disgust that rivalled sickening horror. He had watched his own father die right across the room from him. Disgraceful as Lucius' downfall was, there was no diminishing that fact.

His lungs burned with exhaustion and smoke. His eyes felt dry and sore, and it had been a while since his last full meal. Still, the adrenaline was pumping, and he could afford to wait a little while longer. It would be over soon. Win or loose, dead or alive, it would be over. It amazed him how little he feared death now.

He wondered, as he often did nowadays, how things would have turned out had he actually killed the old Headmaster. Of course he was just as guilty as Snape was, even though he had hesitated like a damn fool. Things had gone so wrong. Twelve days on the run before looping back to meet with the others, constantly looking over his shoulder, squatting in some hovel or cave to keep their tracks covered. And it was always silent. Snape never said a word, just sat there with that unreadable look on his worn face. Sometimes they had fire, when they were certain that they would not be spotted as they moved through forests and small towns. Only sometimes.

Without meaning to, he began counting in his head as he ran the number of people he'd killed in the last few months. Uttering an incantation was really nothing to think about, forcing the hatred and the desire to kill was an act he had mastered long ago. But seeing the bodies after he and the others were done with them was very different from how he had imagined. Lucius had filled his mind with images of pureblood warriors standing proudly over the corpses of putrid, primitive mongrels claiming to be wizards, claiming to be human.

What he found himself staring at, in his nightmares or on the ground at his feet, were the faces of young people who could have gone to school with him. Deep-eyed seniors who might have been looking forward to a vacation in Barbados to celebrate their retirement. Newlyweds who probably didn't even have the chance to try and start a family before they were cut down. Children who would never even grow to learn the meaning of war

And he had been right there at the other end of the wand, laughing maniacally because it was easier than crying about what he'd done. He plagued himself endlessly with options, side stories and histories, hearsays and paranoid delusions of humanity. Delusions, he fervently told his churning conscience. _Delusion_s

_How can a mere animal know how to beg for its life?_

He had promised himself that he would never cry again. No matter how many times he tried to rid himself of the scared little boy inside who wept helplessly in the girls' lavatory while a simpering, doe-eyed ghost looked on, every new kill he added to his list only drove him deeper into it.

Tristan McAllister, aged five. That was his first kill. The only child of a mudblood and muggle woman. He showed signs of being a promising young wizard, and already had a pet toad following him around. McNair and Nott had dragged the little boy forward kicking and screaming, begging for his mother who had been dead for the last twenty minutes. Had Tristan taken a moment to stop thrashing, he would have noticed her naked and ravaged body lying in the corner of the room, while his father was in the next room, writhing under the Cruciatus curse.

They watched from behind their masks as Draco lifted his wand and silenced the boy permanently, nodding with approval and smiling invisibly.

Snape had warned him that they would do that.

"_Killing a child first makes all the others to come seem easier."_

Draco thought he was prepared, and he proved once again what an excellent liar he was as he threw his head back and laughed with all the others at Tristan's twitching carcass, but that night he threw up more times than he could count. And no matter how long he had hovered over that toilet bowl, emptying his stomach of its meagre contents, he could not seem to empty himself of the guilt and revulsion and sinking awareness of something inside that he could not name.

Anna Maria Vasquez, aged twelve. A pretty young thing, even for a squib. They smashed her bedroom window and shoved Draco in first, ordering him to rape and kill her while they took care of her muggle parents downstairs. He had nearly refused point blank to the do the first thing, unable to stop returning her wide-eyed, paralysed stare, but he had been saved the trouble when Crabbe pushed forward to do it first. When Crabbe was done, they made Draco burn her on her own bed. He forced a smirk on his lips even as the stench of her melting flesh made his insides roil like a storm-driven ocean, and he let his eyes go out of focus so that he wouldn't see the way she came apart like that. Her agonized cries and Crabbe's boar-like grunts reverberated in his head for days afterwards. Burning her almost seemed like an act of mercy compared to what that man had done to her.

They got a little older each time. The names formed a ring in his mind, a snake swallowing its own tail as it coiled around his brain. Tristan. Anna Maria. Caroline. Victor. Louise and Dominic, both at the same time. Su-Ling. Stephen, and then Stephen's twin sister Sarah the next night. They had actually commanded Draco to rape Caroline, who was only fifteen, but he could not get himself hard enough to penetrate her, even though he tried to tell himself how disgusting and worthless she was, the only witch in her family. Her panicked screams were simply too unnerving. Unlike most of the others, terror did not get him off. They mocked him relentlessly about it.

"_Don't worry, Malfoy," Marcus Flint had sneered, "I'm sure you'll get it up some day."_

Eventually he had managed to sink far enough into himself that he could rape seventeen-year old Teresa Hardigan a few weeks later before Bellatrix finished her off. It was a deed that his brain could now only register as IT. Teresa had closed her eyes beneath him, squeezing the tears out as she bit her lip to keep from crying out when he tore through her virginity. He shouted profanities and curses down at her as he did IT, when all the while he wanted nothing more than to wipe those tears and calm her trembling limbs. She had been so pretty, even when they split her open. Her face was so pretty.

But the Death Eaters never stopped throwing his impotence with Caroline back in his face. He wondered how many girls he would have to rape before they called him a man. He also wondered if it was worth simple recognition to do IT to another helpless human being.

He still could not convince himself that they were otherwise.

Some nights, when things were quiet between raids and attacks, a bunch of them would sit together in the different houses of each member, distracting themselves from tension and wandering thoughts by reminiscing about the old days. They talked about Harry Potter a lot, what would happen if they ever got their hands on him. Fantasized about what Lord Voldemort would do to the boy before he let them finish him off. They laughed at the idea of making every member of the Weasleys dance on invisible puppet strings before gutting them all when they were still breathing, one by one. Maybe they'd rape the little one, the girl, Ginevra. The discussion around Hermione Granger would often get heated as they figured out different ways to torture her. They wouldn't kill her, no, not right away. The best way to deal with Granger would be to keep her alive as long as possible, humiliating and degrading her until all the shreds of her Gryffindor pride were stripped away. They would make her watch as they skinned her family alive, and if she managed to keep her sanity in tact, she would get to see Potter and her precious Weasley die in ways unfit for an innocent little girl to witness.

The Death Eaters were under the impression that he had had a bit of a thing for Granger, or Mudblood Granger, but the truth is that he had been rather scared of her. Scared of how much she fascinated and infuriated and astounded him, a walking contradiction of everything he was supposed to believe in. Something he was supposed to hate and despise, yet too many times to count he caught himself vying for her attention because she was the only one who didn't seem to fear him. Hell, he knew for a fact that she didn't even hate him, in spite of all the things he had done to them when they went to school.

"_Honestly Ron, stop complaining. Being paired with Draco won't be that bad," she snorted, not realizing he was standing in the next aisle listening to their conversation through the bookshelves. "At least he's good at potions. Having him as a partner will guarantee that you won't fail tomorrow's exam, like you did with Seamus." Even though the Weasel's face was still sour at the thought of the assignment when they left the library, Draco had felt unsettlingly satisfied with himself for the rest of the day._

He always found it odd that she called him by his surname to his face, but among her friends she referred to him as 'Draco'.

But none of that mattered now. He probably wouldn't even see her in the castle. She was most likely off with Potter on that pilgrimage of his to find the Horcruxes. Part of him was inexplicably glad that she might be gone; he was quite certain that if she was found here, the Death Eaters would keep her alive and then make him torture and kill her, something that would no doubt amuse them endlessly. For the life of him, Draco could not figure out why that very idea petrified him so. He had hated her as fiercely as he craved her acknowledgement, perhaps even more. Why shouldn't he be the one to end her miserable, putrid life?

Then again, why should killing muggles and mudbloods in general torment him in the first place?

It was only sheer luck that had kept him from coming across any of his old classmates. Since breaking and entering, their first head-on attack even if it was an ambush, he had only killed some doddering old librarian wielding a crooked wand and a younger man who he recognized as the host from a restaurant in Hogsmeade. The other Death Eaters had flooded in before him, taking care of anyone within sight.

He saw someone strike down one of the Patil twins (he did not stick around to see what was done to her body), and as he ran onward he heard the Weaslette's scream get cut short and a dull thud a heartbeat later. Dean Thomas fell next somewhere in his peripheral vision, and then the Creevey brothers.

"Can you believe it?" Pansy cackled as she passed him. "We can do whatever we want with these mutts, just like we always talked about!"

He smirked emptily at her, inwardly despairing at the shrieking madwoman he once felt he could have married. It used to be just the two of them, two pillars of royalty surrounded by those who either worshipped or despised them, and life had never been so bearable as it was when they would exchange identical grins as though they knew a secret no one else did. Pansy had been lost to him for a while now, but it was not until he saw her thrust her wand tip through Professor Sprout's eye socket and drive it upward that he realized how little he cared now.

Leaving her behind to carry out the rest of her sick games, he moved on. The corridors judged him as he ran, but he shut his senses to them. He didn't even know who or what he was looking for, how long he planned to move, but the idea of standing still in this place longer than a second made his chest and throat clench up.

But he did need to stop for air. The smoke was thickening in the halls, blinding and choking him so that even the need to escape the memories of his school days could not keep him going. He could not tell how long he'd been running, sweeping through the castle like smoke himself, but it must have been a long time. He could already sense the explosions slacking off, becoming less frequent and powerful.

People were tiring. Relief began gnawing at his innards. It wouldn't be long now before he could get the hell out of there, or die. Either option sounded appealing at the moment.

The smoke was overwhelming now. Cursing, he ducked off to an adjacent doorway that had not been blown off its hinges. He took only a few steps in before he collapsed. He fell to his hands and knees on the stone floor, gasping and shaking as he sucked in air that had not yet been contaminated. It was dark in the room, the old DADA class.

Still, he could not breathe properly. He sat back on his heels and removed his mask, shaking the sweat from his hair and running his fingers through it. After a moment he staggered upright and made his way to the windows, wanting to feel new air against his skin. He threw one open and let the warm winds cleanse him, marvelling at how silent the forest looked below.

And then he heard a crash that was so close it actually jarred him out of his detached state. Nerves jangling, he looked to the south wall just beyond the window he was standing at and watched with wide, enraged eyes as several dark figures came darting out of a large gaping hole.

They were flying away! _Without him!_ The whole bloody fight had come crashing down and they were leaving him!

Where had they even gotten the brooms from, anyway? Most of them had Apparated to Hogwarts, and he had grudgingly been forced to let Pansy take him by the hand because he had been to busy during his sixth year to actually master it himself.

His fingers dug into the windowsill and he was about to shout after them when the door closed behind him.

"They left you, didn't they?"

He whirled around so quickly that he nearly fell over.

And when he realized who it was, most of his inner systems shut down for a moment.

"Granger . . ." he murmured, transfixed and with an odd sensation in his stomach.

She had been roused from sleep, by all appearances. Dressed in a long white nightgown that hung off a worry-thin form, her already messy curls looked even more unkempt than usual. Her eyes were hollowed out, her skin pale and drained of its usual pink and gold complexion. She looked like a ghost, only she was as pretty as she had always been in that annoyingly unconventional sense. There were no freckles on her nose. He nearly frowned. Didn't she used to have freckles?

"The others. They abandoned you," she continued, not moving from the door. She was holding a wand, but it was relaxed at her side. He pulled his out in a flash, all systems go once again even in the face of his conflicting emotions at the sight of her.

"Thought you'd be a hero and take me on your own, did you?" he snarled, his mercurial eyes throwing the utmost contempt at her. "Thought you could reclaim that old Gryffindor reputation of yours, mudblood?"

She was staring at him very sadly, and it only occurred to him then how much older she seemed. Seventeen sounded awfully young for someone who looked as if the weight of the world lay on her shoulders.

"I wanted to find you," she told him, returning his gaze evenly. "I wanted to prove myself wrong."

"Oh?" he quipped, wishing he could stop his hand from shaking. "The all-knowing Granger wishes to be wrong for once?"

"About you. I was afraid I would find a soulless, heartless monster instead of the boy I knew at school," she said, shrugging her pitifully thin shoulders. "There's still time for me to find out for sure, but I think I already have it figured out."

"You never knew me," he spat, though he wanted desperately to steer the conversation elsewhere. "Not even in the slightest. Now, where's Potter? If you tell me where he is, I might kill you first rather than make you watch us toy with him for a while."

"Harry's gone," she replied tiredly. "He's been gone for a while. We don't know where he is. We lost contact a few weeks ago."

"Of the two of us, you are not the gifted liar," he sneered, even though he knew she was telling the truth. The longer he delayed the moment when he would have to kill her, the longer he would be able to hold on to the last part of his soul that had not yet been cast away. "I suggest you tell me the truth."

"How does it feel, Draco?" she asked suddenly, gesturing out the window where the last of the fleeing Death Eaters had flown by. "Knowing that the people you trusted over us left you behind to fend for yourself?"

"Shut up!" he barked, his voice cracking. "You shut up and get down on the floor where you belong!"

Then she started walking towards him, even though his wand was aimed right at her chest. "Draco . . ."

"Stay _back_." He took a step away from her, to his chagrin. The look on her face was making his heart hurt. "You get the hell back, Granger, or I swear to God I'll kill you."

"You don't have to be what he made you," she was saying, her voice low and urgent. "Draco, you-"

"DON'T CALL ME THAT!" he exploded, tears making her appear filmy and hazy in the dark. "YOU HAVE _NO_ RIGHT TO USE THAT NAME!"

"Why not?" she asked him, still moving forward. He didn't want her to be so close. He could almost see how long her eyelashes were, how perfect and white her teeth were as they glinted from behind her trembling lips. "Why does it hurt to hear it?"

"SHUT _UP_!" he roared, closing his eyes and making the tears spill out the corners.

She made to speak to him again, words he didn't want to hear, words he could not afford to even think about because he knew what she was going to say. This time he lashed out her physically, wanting her to get away because her nearness was suffocating him, and she was close enough that the back of his hand collided with her mouth.

With a small, breathless grunt she fell to her knees and dropped her gaze, fingers reaching up tentatively to touch her bleeding lip.

"Stay down," he ordered, breathing heavily. He kept his wand point trained on her head. "Don't even think about moving."

She looked up at him, crying silently but with no expression. He began to shake again.

"Now beg," he snarled, the tear trails burning the skin on his face. "Beg for your miserable life, you whore, you _filth_."

It occurred to him that she looked very much like a wood fairy. Not an angel, because angels are beautiful and graceful. She looked too wild, too earthly as she knelt on the stone floor with that untamed hair and those trusting eyes. Fairies were never supposed to cry.

"I said _beg_, mudblood! Let's hear it! Let's hear you beg and plead and cry!" he shouted, wishing she would give him a reason to be disgusted, angry. It would be so much easier to kill her out of irritation than because it would be so easy to cut her down while she was helpless.

But she still had her wand. It sat nestled against the palm of her hand, cradled by gentle fingers. Why did she not use it? How could she sit there so calmly?

_Even animals know how to fight back. She won't even plead or cry. She does nothing_

She _is_ nothing.

_So kill her._ _Forget about animals, mudbloods, witches, wizards, what's right or wrong. Just kill her for being so pathetic down there on the floor with those big stupid eyes that won't look away. End it. Remind yourself who the real monster is._

Then she moved, slowly and gradually standing up. Fear and anger flared up inside. "Stay the fuck down!" he ordered, tightening his hold on the wand. "Goddamn you, get back down!"

She kept coming, ignoring the blood on her lip. "Aren't you tired, Draco?" she asked waveringly. "Aren't you ready to stop this?"

He could only watch through uncomprehending eyes as she walked right up to him, forcing with her steps the wand tip between her breasts, right at her centre. Her hand came up and held it steady.

"How does it feel to have your enemy trust you?" she whispered, her gaze locked with his.

"_AVADA KEDAVRA!_" he screamed, shutting his eyes against the green light that would end this whole night, end the last part of him that cared. "_AVADA KEDAVRA!_"

He may as well have been shouting gibberish for all the effect it was having. His hysteric incantations had no heart; no feeling behind them other than a fierce desperation to make everything stop, make everything go away. "_AVADA KEDAVRA!_"

He screamed his throat raw, and all the while she stood there unflinchingly with her hand over his, keeping his wand in place over her chest. Even under the layers of exhaustion and despair he sensed her tears, her crushing sadness and a readiness for death that nearly escaped his own.

After a while he became angry again, angry that he could not make her go away, make her take those eyes off him. He let go of the wand and she too dropped it, letting it clatter to the floor. His fist came up to break the words waiting on her lips before she could say them, and then suddenly he stopped. She followed his stricken gaze to the back of his clenched hand.

Her blood was there from when he had first hit her, a thin smudge that could have been mistaken for his own. For one moment he was going to be sick with repulsion at the sight of it, filthy contaminated blood touching him, coating him, staining him, reaching down and infecting him through the veins. But then the moment passed and he could only register how normal and unremarkable it looked, smeared against the whiteness of his skin.

_How dare she bleed like a human?_

All the killings had been endurable. Not easy, but endurable, because he had a trick of letting his eyes glaze over so that he would not have to see the blood up close. He knew all this time, all along, that should he ever see it because it would ruin everything he had ever believed, everything he had managed to half accept as truth, or at least something that could not be fought. All because it looked and smelled identical to what flowed inside of him.

And yet as he stood there in the shadow of a ticking clock of revelation, staring down at one harmless little copper smudge on his hand, it seemed perfectly reasonable and acceptable that she had the same blood as his. Why shouldn't it?

The clock of revelation struck midnight then. The chimes went off and a wave of realization hit him so forcefully that he sat down on a nearby chair hard enough to make the wood groan.

"Draco?" she asked softly, still rooted to the spot.

He looked up at her, and saw only pure sorrow, pure concern, pure hope.

Pure.

_She was the pure one._

His blood was the filth he had so long feared and hated. Diluted, bred relentlessly through countless generations all poisoned by the same hate and impossible ideals. He had faded before he was even born, another brick in the wall. Illusions of prestige and privilege came crumbling down.

She was a spring, a clean origin, a foundation of her own. Everything started with people like her, the few who emerged rare and powerful among the mundane.

And it all made so much sense.

"It wasn't you," he choked, the words balling up in his throat. "You were never the enemy. It was me."

What could he say to her? _Sorry?_

_Sorry for degrading you and harassing you? Sorry for killing people who didn't deserve it? Sorry for raping that girl and wishing I could get your face out of my head? Sorry for not seeing how stupid and wasteful and completely senseless this war is?_

Could _sorry_ even exist at this point?

It stunned him that he had never seen this before. She had better grades, though perhaps not by much. She could have easily disarmed him and then killed him before he could even make a break for it. She could outwit him, outfight him, outdistance him in all aspects of life, and he had never acknowledged it before because it did not matter. All that had mattered, all that he had to wave over her head, was the fact that his ancestors were exactly as he was, and that she was different. He could have called her a glitch, an abnormality that had no place with his kind, yet there she was, beating him at everything and he could never understand why. She was the anomaly, the uncertainty, the question that came to mind whenever he tried to envision himself in his father's place.

It was okay to be wrong.

He did not even realize he had been laughing at himself for a while until the laughter switched suddenly to tears, helpless, defeated tears that would leave him dry to the bone.

She came forward and knelt in front of him, and he hid his face from her behind the cage of his fingers, aching at the feel of her small hands moving up his arms to his shoulders. He didn't deserve it, none of it, none of it at all, yet she was touching and holding and forgiving him as if they had been friends right from the beginning.

It was okay to say sorry.

"It hurts," he sobbed, back to the little boy crying in the girls' bathroom. "God, it won't stop. All their faces, the way the girls screamed. I can't stand it, I-I can't . . . End it for me, please. _Please_. It has to stop, but it won't. Please end it, all of it. I don't care anymore."

It was okay to give up, even only sometimes.

"Yes you do," she protested, pulling him closer. She even kissed him on the forehead. He could have laughed at that too, had he been able to step outside of himself to see it. "You _do_ care, otherwise you never would have dropped your wand. It doesn't have to end here, it doesn't! Let me make things better, Draco."

He sighed heavily, shakily. The castle had been still and silent for a while now. "It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me," she told him, almost sternly. "You are not lost to us, Draco, not yet."

He felt like he should tell her that he was lost to both sides, hovering, drifting in and out of meaning. But then, her arms around him felt like the only real anchor he'd ever had in his life, and telling her otherwise seemed very wrong. She owed him nothing, and he owed her an incomprehensible amount of everything.

He closed his eyes and let his head fall forward against her shoulder, tired and spent. When her arms folded around him again, he finally understood that there was a feeling out there better than numbness.

It was okay to be saved.


End file.
